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Comment by ori_b | Hacker News Reader

Groom someone to take over your role. Be honest with your cofounders, tell them you're feeling burned out and you need to take a step back to keep your sanity.

> The product is just too complicated (tons of domain knowledge required) for someone to come in and take over.

I doubt that this is actually true. It may take them time to ramp up, but you're there to guide them and mentor them.

> Additionally, the product just isn't that interesting (glorified CRUD app) and it's been hard to retain developers.

The fact that you're deeply involved and don't feel that other developers can step in, and at the same time feel like it's a glorified CRUD app hints that you may not be giving other developers enough autonomy or context on the problem.

If they are just working on simple CRUD stuff and have no context, the job is going to suck. But simple CRUD with context could be much more interesting.

And if all else fails, pay more.

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"The product is too complicated", "The product isn't interesting", "it's been hard to retain developers" and the founder is burned out. To my casual viewing, it seems very like the founder is exercising too much control over the product.

Especially if the founder hates their job, and there is a revolving door for the developers -- the problem is not likely to be that the implementation is too boring. The problem is more likely to be that the work environment is stifling -- or there is a lot of conflict on the team.

My experience has been that in this kind of situation, the founder is afraid that the workers will fail. To be honest, this is very likely. However, allowing controlled failure is how you build a strong team. Rather than chucking the whole thing in the bin, why not start planning fun things that the team can fail on? If it kills the whole company, at least you had fun. If it doesn't, then you have built pillars on which you can build a platform of trust.

And yes, open the purse strings for at least 1 senior dev who can shoulder the load of fixing inevitable broken things.

I'd like to add something to the simple CRUD app perspective. Make sure you hiring the right people for the job. An engineer with 15 years of senior experience might be bored working on crud apps and might be the wrong person for the job. But a junior engineer, someone fresh out of an engineering academy, or someone early in their career might be excited by the challenge. Everyone says they want to hire "the best". The trick is to hire the best for you and not worry about if they would be the best somewhere else.

I'm in the middle of the road between those, but I love a good CRUD app. If it helps other people be more productive and remove stress from their day it's amazing.

I cut my teeth at my first job on a CRUD app; it was great. Since then things have been less CRUDy, but it can be nice to get a simple CRUD task as a break from more complex tasks.

Conversely, an engineer with 15-20 year's experience may have - and want - a life outside work. And be very happy to trade-off an exciting project for one that allows them to work without using all their mental energy. Because right now there's enough other challenges in life.

For that matter, what isn't a glorified CRUD app? Facebook? CRUD. Amazon? CRUD. Instagram? CRUD. eBay? CRUD.

FWIW it sounds like the founder is more of a techie that is disappointed the tech is so simplistic, and assumes everyone else will feel the same way. Hardly anyone will. A business is a business, a job is a job. Find someone who is more on the business end, customer relationships, product definition, whatever, and is excited to be working on something that's "tech" at all.

Or groom someone to take over some fraction of the role. Someone who can take over some of the load, not necessarily all of it.

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